SAN MARCOS  On Wednesday afternoon, as Bonnie Biggs and I sat across the street from the university where she spent 15 years helping to build North County’s finest library, a dog stared serenely up at me from our feet.

I didn’t mind, though, because it was not just any old mutt. Rescued from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2006, Koshi made her way to Biggs’ house not quite two years after the librarian retired from Cal State San Marcos.

And in Biggs’ care, the even-keeled, 9-year-old canine has a new lease on life, amassing an impressive collection of therapy certifications and pulling her owner into a world of volunteer work.

“I am crazy about dogs, and at my retirement party, the fliers went around campus saying, ‘Bonnie Biggs is going to the dogs,’” she recalled with a laugh. “I knew when I got out, I couldn’t work in a shelter because I would bring them all home.”

Being a 2004 graduate of Cal State San Marcos, I had to ask Biggs about the early days.

“I remember driving out here and looking at the site,” she told me. “Our dean at the time pointed to a spot and said, ‘That’s where our library’s going to be,’ and sure enough, that’s where it is now.”

The Kellogg Library is a splendid, $44 million facility that opened in 2004—the year when Biggs retired and I graduated. If nothing else, we have that in common, leaving campus just as the shiny new book temple opened its doors.

Like almost anyone who worked for Cal State San Marcos in the early 1990s, when the campus was just taking root off Twin Oaks Valley Road, Biggs wore several hats.

In addition to her job as a librarian, she served as assistant to the dean and launched the popular Arts and Lectures series that is still staging guest speakers and concerts today.

At the end of her career, she also spent three years developing the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center, drawing on a longtime passion for cultivating libraries on San Diego County’s 18 tribal reservations.

In 1986, when she started working for the San Diego State University extension campus in San Marcos, “Tribal libraries were just beginning to develop … and move from an oral tradition to understanding the need for housing the printed word,” she recalled. “Pala, for instance, has a fabulous library. Pauma has a really good library. At one time, Viejas had a good library.”

Gradually, Biggs withdrew from the university that had sprouted from a scrappy upstart into a flourishing campus with parking issues.

She still sits on a couple of committees, but what mostly occupies her time now is a nonprofit organization called Love on a Leash. Based in Oceanside, the national pet-therapy group has Biggs as the vice president of its board.

And Biggs has Koshi. Together, they spend hours every week visiting the elderly and infirm.

“There’s a whole field of research now that says just by petting a dog, your heart rate lowers, blood pressure lowers, muscles relax,” Biggs said. I couldn’t help imagining her behind a reference desk, doling out this information.